Health, healing and religion: An African view

Abstract

“All sorts and conditions” of third world My invitation was to read a paper on “Health, healing and religion as under- stood and practised in Asian or African cultures”. I have taken the “or” in the assigned topic seriously not only because I am not confident to wax eloquently on Asia but also because of time constraints. However, there is a deeper rea- son: it is not unusual to treat the so-called South, third world or developing world as one block over against the North or first world or developed world. Such efforts tend to miss out on the “all sorts and conditions’’ of the so-called third world, with the result that solutions emerging from such broad general- izations time and again either do not satisfy anyone or prove impracticable in many a third world region. All sorts and conditions of the African Again, homo Aflicanus is a multi-headed hydra. The Caucasians of South Africa and Namibia are as much African as the Bantu Negroes south of the Equator. The former have known no other home but Southern Africa since the 17th and 18th centuries. Into that polysemous, polyphonous, multivocal African in Southern Africa may be thrown Bushmen from the Kalahari, Hot- tentots and Pygmies from Congo Basin, the Negroes of West Africa, Hamitic Negroes of Northern East and East Central Africa and the nowNegroid Hamites of North Africa, and Arabs. This story of multi-headed homo Afiicanus has implications for the cultures and religions of Africa. There are cultures many; and as Tillich and Niebuhr’ argued, culture is the solvent of religion. Because there are many cultures, there are many religions. Even within the one religion, such as Christianity or Islam, there will be cultural additives, which have everything to do with peo- ples’ perspectives and expressions. This, my paper, at best is an African view, and certainly not the African view.